Our Projects

ETR can support your organization or project in numerous ways to best fulfill your goals. Whether you need short-term capacity-building assistance, customized trainings, program evaluations, full-scale research projects, technical assistance clearinghouses, or high-quality print and digital resources, we can help. Please review our core competencies to learn more about our areas of expertise.

ETR's multidisciplinary teams are committed to the highest standards of quality in their respective fields.

Type of Project

Status

ETR was awarded a Personal Responsibility Education Innovative Strategies Program grant from the Family & Youth Services Bureau to refine and evaluate a relationships-based program called About Us. About Us is an innovative intervention that draws on developmental neuroscience principles to support young people in exploring and developing healthy romantic relationships and using condoms and highly effective contraceptives if having sex. ETR has partnered with the California School-Based Health Alliance to implement About Us in school-based health centers located in rural or suburban counties in California with large Hispanic populations. The evaluation is being conducted by Dr. Eric Walsh-Buhi and his team from the Graduate School of Public Health/ Institute for Behavioral and Community Health at San Diego State University.

ETR is serving as external evaluator of CHLA’s adaptation of Project AIM for teen moms. AIM 4 Teen Moms is an individualized intervention for teen moms age 15-19 with one child between the ages of 1 and 7 months. It includes 7 one-on-one sessions in the teen’s home and 2 group sessions. The evaluation is an individual level randomized controlled trial that includes a baseline, 12-month, 24-month, and 36-month survey administered via an audio computer assisted interview (ACASI). ETR successfully recruited 950 teens for participation in the study. The 12-month follow-up rate was 85% and 24-month is running at more than 80%.

ETR was funded by the CDC to develop, implement and evaluate All4You!, a 2-component intervention (behavioral skills and community involvement/service learning) for youth in alternative schools with a high rate of sexual risk behaviors. The program was successful in reducing selected sexual risk-taking behaviors at 6 months.

With funding from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, ETR developed, implemented and evaluated the individual and combined effects of interventions that featured a skills- and norms-based curriculum, All4You2!, and/or service learning. The study involved youth in continuation schools. Results show modest short-term impacts of the skills-based curriculum, but not the service-learning or the combined service-learning/curriculum intervention.

The goal of this project is to systematically analyze and summarize research on the benefits of computer game programming for children. In the last decade, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of tools and opportunities for children and young adults to learn to program computer games, but no accumulation of knowledge about what children learn, the best pedagogical strategies, and which tools and learning environments promote different kinds of outcomes, and for whom. The methodology will use an integrative approach, specifically a meta-synthesis, which is an interpretive integration of qualitative and quantitative research findings based on a systematic literature search and analysis process. The study will go through seven steps, and a panel of content and methodology experts will evaluate the rigor and transparency at each step of the analysis process. The results will be written up and shared with three audiences: academic researchers, educators and program developers, and funders.

This project is building technical education pathways that motivate and prepare rural, high school students from underrepresented groups to enter and stay on information and communications technology (ICT) pathways. It involves two key strategies: building strong, sustainable partnerships across high schools, community colleges, and employers, and infusing ICT skills into digital media high school classes and aligning them with college classes and workforce needs. This “stealth recruitment” approach is in contrast to most efforts that take a marketing approach that tries to convince students of the value of ICT classes; instead it leverages students’ interests in digital media and contextualizes their learning. Read more >>

With the rapid rise of coding boot camps promising training that leads directly to lucrative jobs, industry has more options for finding trained employees to fill software development jobs. However, it is not well understood who attends these boot camps and how the training they offer aligns with workforce needs. This study—a collaborative work with the College of Charleston—investigates what skills and knowledge both coding boot camps and university computer science programs offer to their students and how these align with the skills and knowledge that employers seek in newly minted software developers.

This project primarily addresses the following priority population(s): American Indian and Low Income American Indian populations.California's Clean Air Project (CCAP) will work in the following geographical communities: Statewide in the 33 counties where American Indian populations reside. CCAP shares the belief of the State and many others working in tobacco control: All workers should have the right to be protected from the dangers of SHS in their workplaces. Read more >>

This study aims to understand the conditions under which pair programming can foster the kind of thinking and problem solving that will prepare middle school students to pursue and persist in computing fields. The design experiment involves 80 girls and boys from a range of socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds who are enrolled in game programming classes. Read more >>

ETR coordinated and developed capacity-building services for 27 CDC-funded non-government organizations (NGOs) serving a range of constituents, including juvenile justice providers, service providers to runaway/homeless youth, and state and local education agencies. In collaboration with DASH staff, ETR developed and conducted a comprehensive needs assessment process to inform an annual calendar of CBA events, in the form of multi- and single-day trainings, roundtable discussions, webinars and workshops addressing both content and functions.

ETR, in partnership with CDC-DASH, spearheaded the first national “Programs that Work” initiative, which built the capacity of state and local education agencies (SEAs and LEAs) to disseminate and institutionalize HIV/STD evidence-based interventions (EBIs) and other health education programs. This work included training and technical assistance on EBI selection and implementation, as well as policy and environmental elements necessary for adoption and institutionalization, including gaining stakeholder buy-in and developing infrastructure needed for effective implementation and sustainability. This program reached all 77 funded SEAs and LEAs and provided training to over 250 school districts nationwide.

ETR provided national capacity-building assistance for staff in alternative schools, homeless youth organizations and juvenile justice to implement evidence-based and evidence-informed HIV/STD prevention and sexual health promotion practices and policies. The project worked at the policy level by assisting sites in educating stakeholders and providing training to staff who work directly with youth, and also facilitated linkages between youth and sexual health services, particularly youth-friendly HIV/STD testing. The project reached nearly 20,000 high-risk youth in hundreds of juvenile justice facilities and alternative schools from 25 states, and trained staff from 106 agencies who then conducted training events for community stakeholders.

ETR built and managed the Capacity Building Resource Center (CRC), an online resource designed to facilitate communication and collaboration between the CDC-funded Capacity Building Assistance (CBA) providers and CDC’s Capacity Building Branch (CBB) key staff, with the goal of improving the delivery and effectiveness of HIV prevention services provided to the nation’s workforce who serve populations at risk for HIV. The interactive, password-protected website allowed CBA Providers access to timely CDC news alerts and documents related to public health and included a resource library, webinars, CBA provider directory and e-learning courses. Center staff coordinated and archived monthly CBA Network calls; ensured quality of materials through review, assessment and approval by CDC; and completed a yearly assessment of current and future TA needs for CRC services.

The CEH (Communities Energized for Health) project addresses exposure to secondhand smoke where Californians live, work, and play. Objective 1, the primary objective of this project: The Yolo County Public Housing Authority Commission with jurisdiction over public housing in the cities of Esparto, West Sacramento, Winters, Woodland, Knights Landing, and unincorporated Yolo County (all serving a predominantly low socio-economic populations) will adopt and implement legislated policies designating all indoor and outdoor common areas and 100% of individual units (including balconies and patios) in multi-unit housing (MUH) complexes, as entirely smoke-free, with the option of including designated smoking areas at least 25 feet from any entrance or windows.

The Community College Information Technology (CCIT) is a longitudinal study, focused on two-year colleges in California that serve 2.7 million students each year. Previous research on community college (CC) students’ enrollment and persistence in Information Technology (IT) courses/programs is limited or has not focused exclusively on CC students.

ETR’s Community Impact Solutions Project (CISP) works to strengthen the capacity of the HIV workforce to plan, implement, and sustain community high-impact HIV prevention interventions and strategies. We support prevention with HIV positive individuals, high-risk negative individuals, and Organizational Development and Management to community-based organizations. CISP applies a blended learning approach driven by the Adult Learning Theory to ensure all CBA is effectively addressed in this way.

ETR has developed, implemented and analyzed studies of over 800 middle school students in computer game programming classes, including developing and testing curriculum and pedagogical approaches for using game programming to teach computational concepts, and testing a range of strategies to assess learning. A systematic synthesis of research on what children learn from computer game programming was begun in fall of 2014.

Latinos are the fasting growing ethnic minority population in the US, but are underrepresented in computing fields. In this project, we are designing and testing an afterschool program that aims to increase the interest and capacity of Latino youth to pursue and persist in computing fields, and build their capacity to transform their schools. Read more >>

This program used a near-peer strategy for infusing Computer Science (CS) content and the connection between CS and the social good into the K-12 curriculum, because effective strategies for engaging Latino/a students in CS require an increased focus on the societal implications of computing.

ETR was awarded a 5-year contract to provide training and technical assistance (TTA) support for professional development (PD) and capacity building assistance to DASH-funded State Education Agencies (SEA) and Local Education Agencies (LEA) in order to strengthen the approaches required under the 1308 cooperative agreement. We have named this contract the DASH Professional Learning Collaborative or PLC for short. The PD team at ETR is referred to as the PLC Core Team.

This project aims to identify effective strategies that community technology centers can use to prepare, support and motivate underserved high school students to pursue and persist in computer science courses and careers. This is a partnership between ETR and a community technology center called the Digital NEST that prepares Latino/a high school students for the tech workforce.